I started with the screen. Now I own the problem.
I take the work seriously. Myself, a lot less so. I work with empathy for my team and the people we build for, and I want to know the work adds value.
For years a quiet voice kept asking whether I was adding value or just output. Product thinking gave that feeling a name, and the question turned out to be the job.
People say I bring a calm clarity. I go deep on a problem, find each person's secret sauce and connect it to the work. At home it's the same curiosity, just quieter: learning something new, and being calm with my cats.
The path
My early work was about people more than technology. I designed software for an educational robot for children, tested an electronic health record at Discovery as a usability analyst, worked on insurance and rewards at Momentum, and set up a formal UX research practice at Derivco. Each time, the job was the same: make something unfamiliar usable for the person who actually had to use it.
At Barrows I moved from designing the product to owning it, first as Product Owner and then as Software Development Manager. The questions got bigger. What would we build, what would we cut, and did the people doing the work have a way to grow?
Then came iKhokha, and about five years accountable for in-person payments. Merchants' livelihoods ran on those card machines, and the domain I looked after sat behind the majority of the company's revenue and active usage. I led people across UX, QA, engineering and analysis to keep it that way.
Now I'm at Spot Money, part of Ignition Group, on a consumer banking app. I started by walking it as a new customer would, then used AI to get oriented faster, so the conversations with my team could be about judgement, history and risk.
Where I studied
I studied visual communication at Open Window, first a BA and then an honours degree in narrative. Later came an MFA in Technology and Virtual Reality at AFDA, about how emerging technology changes story and media. After that I picked up a CSPO, the UCT/GetSmarter product management certificate and Reforge. They were useful, but they were never the main thing.
How I work
Payments is where I've gone deepest, but design is still the craft I lead with, and the things I build still start as a sketch. I moved into product management so I could own the problem and the priorities, not only the screen.
AI is changing how this work gets done, so I'm relearning the craft as it changes, and I check what the models give me before I trust it.